


Choking On Those Words

by ophellos



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8358997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophellos/pseuds/ophellos
Summary: They dance around it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Elate week (elateweek.tumblr.com) for the prompt love.
> 
> Something a little experimental.

She falls in love with him in the sheets of hotel beds, in the warmth of his body next to her. It’s coming up through her throat when he lays her down on the bed, covers her body with his. It’s at the back of her teeth when she wakes with her fingers in his hair and his head resting on her breast. It is only three months into their long distance, not-dating, talk-every-day-and-catch-spontaneous-flights-to-see-each-other-thing. It’s too early and it’s terrifying and it’s on the tip of her lips.

She muffles it into his neck, turns it into moans and shaking breaths. Makes it into something she can handle, something he can’t understand. Sometimes he looks at her as if it slipped out; he stares down at her with indecipherable fear in his eyes. She pushes it deeper, buries the words alive because the panic behind that quick, cocky smile only makes her surer that the only thing those words will bring is an end to whatever this is.

 

He falls in love with her in the absence. When the poison has been exchanged and the fires extinguished, he realizes that he loved her. That he loves her.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder and he wants to tear his out of his fucking chest.

He erases her number from his phone but he can’t erase it from his brain. He scribbles it into a page of his journal, surrounds it with names and numbers that don’t matter to try to prove to himself that she doesn’t matter either.

She’s in the flowers he presses and in the sunsets he catches himself wishing they were sharing. She’s in the empty bed he dreads facing. She’s in the gentle voice his best friend uses to mention her name and it’s ridiculous how fragile they treat the subject because it was only a few months and he loves her and it means nothing.

 

He says it first, whispered into her stomach as his lips trace the scarred tissue, his hands clasping hers as if he could anchor her to this world by sheer willpower. 

_I love you I love you I love you I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry._

 

It’s a week before she can say it back. She wakes and reaches out for him, seeking his firm, grounding presence and her hands instead catching air. She tip-toes down the stairs to find him hunched over a book, dark circles under red eyes. As he pulls her into his lap she feels him shake, knows they’re awake for the same reason.

It looms above them still, encroaches on their dreams, emerges in their kisses; sometimes it feels like they didn’t survive that grenade, like the pin had been yanked out from their own brains and it was only a matter of time before the real damage is done.

She grips him tightly, murmurs it into his ear, curled up in his lap on the couch at 2am. 

_I love you. I’m still here._


End file.
